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Little Orphan Annie

Little Orphan Annie debuted on August 5, 1924 in but a single newspaper. Over the next 44 years. Annie became a cultural icon — in both her red-headed, blank-eyed appearance, and as the embodiment of American individuality, spunk, and self-reliance. Even those who’s never read the comic strip are keenly aware of the plucky orphan, her loveable mutt Sandy, and her adoptive benefactor Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks — through the Broadway play, the hit movie, and the song “Tomorrow” made famous by both.

Born in Kankakee, Illinois in 1894, Harold Gray began his cartooning career as an assistant to Sidney Smith, creator of the famously successful strip, The Gumps. Gray wrote and illustrated Little Orphan Annie from 1924 until his death in 1968.

"Check out The Complete Little Orphan Annie by Harold Gray. The blank-eyed orphan was far grittier and moving than the saccharine Annie you know from the damn musical. [It] started in 1924 in a world chillingly like ours: crawling with cake-eaters, greedy bankers and international con men who exploit the hardscrabble working stiffs Annie hangs with when her "Daddy" isn't around to protect her. The cartoonist, a tightlipped Midwestern Dickens, pushes the virtues of honesty, pluck, and hard work in adventures that can melt the heart of even hard-boiled cynics like I pretend to be."

-Art Spiegelman, thedailybeast.com

"The Complete Little Orphan Annie has raised the bar against which such compilations will be judged. The research, the articles providing insight and context, and most importantly the glorious reproduction of the material have preserved these strips for those who knew them and offers a new gateway to adventure for those discovering them for the first time. The Sunday pages are perhaps the truest color reproductions of this sort of early work.... Reading this book is like diving into history, without the musty smell.

-Scoop

"In 1924, Gray offered Little Orphan Annie as a radical departure-a serious, often bleak drama.... This maiden volume gives us a chance to reappraise Gray, one of the most controversial cartoonists of his generation-and, via his career, American conservatism. For as modern conservatism struggles to define itself...Gray's strip about a little orphan girl in a cold, cruel world is the story of where that movement, and modern graphic literature, began."